Finally something really interesting to talk about. If you've used UNIX or any of its derivatives, you've probably wondered why there's /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin in the file system. You may even have a rationalisation for the existence of each and every one of these directories. The thing is, though - all these rationalisations were thought up after these directories were created. As it turns out, the real reasoning is pretty damn straightforward.

This paper describes the possibility of replacing
logical sharing by self-contained binaries. The
overhead of memory and storage is mitigated by
physical sharing (memory and disk deduplication). A
self-contained binary mitigates the problems which
come from the dynamic management of logical
sharing, such as search path replacement attack, GOT
overwrite attack, and Dependency Hell.

Experiments demonstrated the effect of
self-contained binaries, memory deduplication (KSM),
and storage deduplication (LBCAS). Self-contained
binaries increased the files to 40.66 times bigger than
normal, but deduplication mitigated the overhead to
less than 1.4 times on memory, storage, and time.
Current deduplication has been used for multiple
virtual machine instances or multiple versions of
storage images. However, this paper shows that deduplication is useful on a single OS image. This
direction indicates a new use for deduplication.